Opinion
Plenty of results from social psychology fail to replicate, but there is one that is not only enduring but also becoming more important: Patience really matters.Economists have once again entered the fray, this time with a study that tries to determine how patience is correlated with better educatio...
Artificial intelligence advances in a manner that’s hard for the human mind to grasp. For a long time nothing happens, and then all of a sudden something does. The current revolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT resulted from the advent of “transformer neural networks&...
How happy are Americans, really? This country has its troubles, surely, but a new study suggests things may be better than they seem.Two economists, David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Alex Bryson of University College London, have come up with a new and more intuitive way to measure well-being. ...
With Rishi Sunak as prime minister of the UK, it is now impossible to deny what has been evident for some while: Indian talent is revolutionizing the Western world far more than had been expected 10 or 15 years ago.You might think UK leadership is an exception, but consider the US. It is entirely po...
This year has brought a lot of innovation in artificial intelligence, which I have tried to keep up with, but too many people still do not appreciate the import of what is to come. I commonly hear comments such as, “Those are cool images, graphic designers will work with that,” or, &ldqu...
If 2021 was the breakthrough year for mRNA vaccines, then 2022 may be the breakthrough year for artificial intelligence. So far there have been major advances in text generation and image generation, and now investor Nat Friedman is predicting big developments in AI personal voice assistants. More i...
I am writing this from Amritsar, India, in the state of Punjab. The Sikh Golden Temple here is one of India’s leading attractions, and last night I shared space with thousands of people over the course of four or five hours. In that time, I saw only two people who might qualify as White Wester...
Kim Stanley Robinson writes bestselling novels about a colony on Mars. Elon Musk talks of actually colonizing Mars. There is even a 30-page constitution, courtesy of a Yale political science class, for a Mars settlement. The actual prospects for a settlement remain uncertain, but the question of how...
In the never-ending quest to make the world a better place, a new idea is beginning to draw more attention: educational migration. If you want to assist someone in a poor country, why not spend extra money and help them get a good college education in the West?Part of the appeal of educational migra...
It is conventional wisdom that misinformation — particularly about Covid and vaccines, and often enabled by social and other media — is worse than it’s ever been. It’s hard to measure misinformation over time. But the premise that there was ever a golden age of accurate infor...
While projections for the spread of the omicron variant of Covid-19 remain tentative, it seems to be much more transmissible (almost certain) and more benign (far less certain). It’s not only that more people are vaccinated or have some form of natural immunity, but also that the variant itsel...
The nuclear fusion startup Helion, which announced recently that it has raised $500 million, says it has developed new technologies that may make nuclear fusion viable — practically, economically and environmentally.It is too early to tell if its claims will pan out, but there have been so man...
The advent of gaming, especially computer gaming, marks a fundamental break in human affairs. Gaming is profoundly transforming two central aspects of the modern world: culture and regulation. There will be no turning back.When it comes to culture, the West has been in a dialogue with itself for cen...
How weird is the future going to be? Just a little bit — or plain flat-out radically unthinkably weird? And is this future 1,000 years from now — or 100?The notion that the future will be weirder than we think, and come sooner, is a possibility raised by Holden Karnofsky, the co-chief ex...
Energy policy is often judged by three criteria: cost, reliability and effect on carbon emissions. That makes good sense, but I would like to suggest an alternative approach: Ask which green energy policies can get the support of most special-interest groups, and the fewest forces in opposition, and...
More than 10 million people die each year from air pollution, according to a new study — far more than the estimated 2.6 million people who have died from Covid-19 since it was detected more than a year ago. And while Covid is headline news, ordinary air pollution remains a side issue for poli...
Sins of commission and sins of omission are often treated differently, but it’s not clear they should be. Most of us, for example, would never dream of killing another person. At the same time, about 160,000 people around the world die every day, often of preventable causes. Letting people die...
One feature of the COVID-19 era is how much the standard ways of seeing and doing things have been remixed and turned upside down. The obvious question is then whether people will decide to make these new arrangements permanent or return to the old.For example: I used to enjoy going to nouvelle-styl...
The question of herd immunity — specifically, whether some cities and regions are acquiring it sooner than expected and thus have higher than expected protection against covid-19 — has been attracting more attention lately.Even if this hypothesis is true, however, it still leaves the wor...
When the discussion turns to which countries have responded best to covid-19 — and if nothing else, the pandemic frees up a lot of time for this debate — those most often mentioned are Taiwan, New Zealand and Vietnam.I would like to make a more surprising nomination: the UK covid-19 is a...
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